‘The Grid, Unplugged’ (Important Drawings from the 1970’s) was an exhibition of a group of drawings by one of the essential twentieth century artists from India, Nasreen Mohamedi (1937-1990). The works at the Talwar Gallery represented a significant body of the artists’ oeuvre from the 1970s

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Untitled
18 3/4″ x 18 3/4″
Graphite and Ink on Paper
ca. 1970s

Untitled
7 1/2″ x 7 1/2″
Graphite and Ink on Paper
ca. 1970s

Untitled
7 1/2″ x 7 1/2″
Graphite and Ink on Paper
ca. 1970s

Untitled
7 1/2″ x 7 1/2″
Graphite and Ink on Paper
ca. 1970s

Untitled
18 3/4″ x 18 3/4″
Graphite and Ink on Paper
ca. 1970s

Untitled
18 3/4″ x 18 3/4″
Graphite and Ink on Paper
ca. 1970s

Mohamedi, employing pen and pencil, transformed the nineteen and seven inch squares of paper into a tour de force. Remarkably executed over three decades ago in an environment where narrative and figurative art was the rule, Mohamedi’s clarity of pursuit and resolve is matched only by the taut tensile energy resonating through the lines. Dismantling the rigidity of the grid, she infuses them with a dynamic rhythm that at times soars, dives, expands, and collapses. Like the footsteps of sunlight through a courtyard or wind sweeping over water, they are abstract in form but not in experience. Her drawings suggest the magnanimous yet simple phenomenon so truly that they infuse an awe-inspiring chill as to the immensity of our experience and the poverty of means used to elicit it.

On returning to India in the early sixties after studying in London and Paris, Nasreen broke away from the milieu of representational art pervasive in post independence India and carved out a unique space for herself at the crest of Indian modernism. Distilling her perceptions to their essence, her means to the essential, un-tethered she floated, above and away from any categorization. Extracting the structure within nature and unleashing the poetry residing within structure, Mohamedi strove to create a unity through form between the outside and the inside. The waves in the sea, the sand under the waves, the sun over the sea, in Mohamedi’s drawings they are all on a single plane, interconnected, and susceptible to the gentle variance of the viewer’s perception. [Nasreen Mohamedi : Talwar Gallery]